BT 590 

T5 V7 
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 




UNITED STATES OF AMEBICA. 



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CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 



TWO LECTURES 



DELIVERED BEFORE THE NEW YORK SUNDAY-SCHOOL 
TEACHERS' ASSOCIATION, 



MARVIN R. VINCENT, D.D. 




NEW YORK: 
ANSON D. F , RANDOLPH & COMPANY^ 
9OO BROADWAY, COR. 20th STREET. 



Copyright, 1886, by 
Anson D. F. Randolph & Company, 




EDWARD O. JENKINS' SONS; 

Printers and Siereotyfiers s 
go North William St., New York, 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 



I. 

It is a vast and most tempting subject which 
you have assigned me. At best you will not 
expect me to do more than to touch a point 
here and there on the circumference of the 
theme. That I may do even thus much, let 
me waste no time in preliminary words. I am 
to speak of CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 

None of us will dispute the rightfulness of 
the title which our Lord gives Himself in the 
thirteenth of John (v. 13) : " Ye call me master 
(or teacher) and Lord, and ye say well, for so 
I am." He is the representative teacher; the 
teacher of teachers ; the model and the inspi- 
ration of the most successful. theories of teach- 
ing. Back to Him we must go, down the 
whole long line of sages and philosophers, for 
the best example of the art of expounding 
truth to uninstructed minds. Our admiration 
grows as we apprehend the conditions under 
which He taught, and the character of His 
material He had not to deal with virgin soil. 



4 CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 

The teacher who grapples with a fresh mind, 
unbiased by religious opinions or definite re- 
ligious conceptions, has a great advantage 
over one w T ho must reach a mind through a 
jungle of false conceptions and prejudices, 
rooted in tradition, developed by false meth- 
ods of training, and backed by perhaps the 
most arrogant and dictatorial ecclesiasticism 
the world has ever known. It was very much 
for even some such auditors to say, " Never 
man spake like this man." 

THE POWER OF CHRIST'S PERSONALITY. 

And here we catch more than a hint of the 
first great element of Christ's power as a 
teacher — His PERSONALITY. It was the man 
that carried and drove home the teaching. 

Power in teaching is bound up with charac- 
ter in the teacher. Truth, from a real teacher, 
is not like water running through a marble or 
silver channel which imparts no character to 
it. It is rather like water in a medicated cup 
which communicates its flavor to the liquid. 
A mind is not merely a receptacle for facts ; 
it is a germ to be informed, and only life can 
inform with life. Formulas of truth quicken 
as the teacher's life pervades them. The in- 
stinct of the youngest pupil is to put the 
teacher before the lesson. Scores of men who 



CHRIST AS A TEA CHER. g 

never exerted a fraction of Thomas Arnold's 
power over English youth, were his superiors 
in knowledge and in what goes to make the 
drill-master ; but the best thing which the 
Rugby boys carried aw r ay from Rugby was 
the impress of Arnold himself. 

The great illustration of this truth is Christ. 
The power of Christianity is the power of a 
person rather than of a system. His w r ords 
are " spirib and life," because He speaks 
them. I do not mean merely that His pres- 
ence was commanding and His mode of speech 
fascinating, though that might well be the 
case ; but I mean that the Man and His say- 
ings were inseparably welded ; that the say- 
ings were the outcome of the man's inmost 
quality and fibre. Christ is the incarnated 
denial of the French diplomatist's falsehood 
that "the great object of language is to 
conceal thought/' Christ himself appeared 
through all the windows of His speech. You 
would not be slow to appreciate the difference 
between Webster's reply to Hayne, thundered 
forth by the great expounder of the Constitu- 
tion in person, and the same speech declaimed 
in the best style by a clever school-boy. You 
do not stop to analyze such differences ; you 
feel them. Of Christ it has been beautifully 
said, " To hear His daily speech was not 



6 



CHRIS T AS A TEA CHER. 



simply to receive His thoughts but to share, 
as it were, the inmost life of His spirit. His 
speech is, after eighteen centuries, exceeding 
wonderful to the world, and humanity still 
listens to it as one listens to a tale he can not 
choose but hear ; yet to the men who first 
heard it, it was made fully intelligible by His 
person. To hear His speech was to enjoy 
His fellowship ; and His fellowship created 
the sense that understood His speech. His 
words came to them explained by a living 
and articulate commentary." That was pre- 
eminently true of our Lord which was said of 
a certain literary character of England, that 
" his conversation was companionship and his 
companionship conversation. " Christ's words, 
spoken by Plato or Aristotle, would not have 
been " spirit and life." No homily or treatise 
will generate the enthusiasm of a true student. 
Men will not suffer martyrdom for an abstrac- 
tion, nor meet a code with self-surrender. 
Self will not capitulate to sermons. The 
sermon must flame into a life. Christ at the 
tomb of Lazarus gives the real clench to 
Paul's argument in First Corinthians: " Love 
your enemies" must be translated into the 
w T ood and nails of the cross before men will 
decipher it. 

The first and highest requisite of a Sunday- 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER. j 

school teacher, therefore, is a well-defined 
Christian personality. Study of the Scrip- 
tures will not, of itself, make a teacher. The 
work begins deeper than that. The teacher 
is not set merely to explain the geography 
and the customs of Bible lands or the mean- 
ing of hard texts. He is not merely to give 
his pupils information : he is to inform them 
with the quality of a Christ-like character ; 
and for this he must have " Christ formed 
within " him. He is to be a moral and spir- 
itual power, not an encyclopaedia. He is to 
be not mere ammunition, but powder on fire. 
Paul, as you remember, in his counsel to 
Timothy, puts self before teaching : " Take 
heed to thyself and unto thy teaching "; for 
it is thyself that teaches. Similarly he said 
to the Ephesian elders: "Take heed unto 
yourselves and unto the flock/' 

This whole line of thought will find further 
illustration in the second characteristic of our 
Lord's teaching, to which we now come. 

CHRIST A DOGMATIC TEACHER. 

Christ was a dogmatic teacher. I know that 
the word "dogma" jars upon some ears, but 
it is a fair question whether the word or the 
ear is responsible for the jar. A defective ear 
courts false harmonies. The King of Siam, 



8 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 



according to the story, was more delighted 
with the orchestra's preliminary jargon in tun- 
ing their instruments than with their grandest 
symphony, and asked to have " that first piece " 
repeated. Many are afraid of the word " dog- 
ma" because they mistake, or only partially 
apprehend, its meaning. " Dogma" is a good 
New Testament word, which always carries the 
sense of authority. That was the very thing 
which astonished the people in Christ's teach- 
ing. "He taught them as one having authority." 
Possibly we believe in dogma more than we 
think. If we follow back some of the things 
about which we are surest, we may find that 
they rest on dogma after all. You and I began 
our education with dogma. When you stood 
beside your mother and began upon the alpha- 
bet, little knew or cared you about Cadmus or 
the theory of phonetics. Your mother said, 
" That is A," and you believed it, and have 
acted upon your belief ever since. I know 
there is said to have been at least one excep- 
tion to that rule. I have somewhere read of 
a stuttering Block Island boy who essayed the 
alphabet for the first time, and on being told 
that the character on the blackboard was A, 
replied, " H-h-how do y-you know i-it's A?" 
The teacher meekly replied that her teacher 
had told her so ; whereupon the young skep- 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER. g 

tic, after a long look at the doubtful character, 
stolidly responded, " H-h-how did you k-n-now 
he d-d-didnt l-l-lie ? " But we may safely affirm 
that such hopeless exceptions are rare. Most 
of us learned the alphabet dogmatically at 
our mother's knee or — over it. It was the 
same with the multiplication table, and with 
a hundred other things. We have no better 
reason for believing them than that we were 
told so. The purest dogmatism is the basis of 
at least two-thirds of our knowledge. Dogma 
is a fundamental necessity of our education. 
It is simply impossible, as it would be foolish 
if it were possible, to follow down every item 
of our knowledge to its roots. A life might 
be consumed upon a single item. It is at once 
our right and our duty to enter into other 
men's labors, and to stand upon the founda- 
tions they have laid. All honest and thorough 
work saves the time and the labor of future 
generations. No locomotive-builder thinks it 
necessary, in order to construct a perfect ma- 
chine, that he should begin where Stephenson 
did, and work up through each successive stage 
to the present level of knowledge and mechan- 
ical skill. He starts with the latest and best 
model he can find. 

No one will understand me to depreciate 
research, nor to mean that religious truth is to 



10 



CHRIST AS A TEA CHER. 



be received on mere authority, an idea which 
is contrary to the whole spirit, attitude, and 
teaching of the Gospel. It is a Christian 
apostle who bids us be ready to give to every 
man that asketh us a reason of the hope that 
is within us. But I am speaking of teaching 
and of methods of teaching ; and my point is 
that all teaching must include dogma, and, 
ordinarily, must begin with dogma. If you 
want to instruct a child or an ignorant person 
about the soul, you do not begin with a dis- 
cussion of the nature of spirit and matter; 
you do not pretend to lead the pupil through 
every stage of knowledge and proof, You 
start with dogmatic statement : " You have a 
soul, and that something in you which you 
know and feel is there, — -that something which 
is not your hand nor your foot, nor anything 
about your body, but which thinks and wills 
and chooses, and is glad or sorry,— is your 
soul." I say dogma does not exclude question 
or research. On the contrary the true teacher 
dogmatizes in order to set his pupil thinking 
and asking questions, Properly viewed, dog- 
ma is the true preparation and stimulant for 
research. 

Now, Christ's teaching is a notable illustra- 
tion of this. Not that He does not invite 
question; not that He does not explain; but 



CHRIST AS A TEA CHER. 



I 1 



the great, fundamental characteristic of His 
method is assertion, — simple, authoritative 
statement. " The facts about God and His 
kingdom, and life and death and judgment, 
are thus and so." And these statements were 
not authoritative in form and manner only. 
They carried the sense of authority, and im- 
pressed and moved men from a point deeper 
than their logic. Christ was a notable illus- 
tration of the remark that " power of state- 
ment is power of argument. " Christ knew 
men too well to attempt to reach the masses 
with argument. Even the learned Nicodemus' 
first essay is met with that most tremendous 
dogma in the New Testament, " Except a 
man be born again, he can not see the king- 
dom of God." 

Perhaps we do not fully realize what a deli- 
cate and dangerous experiment it was for a 
radical reformer like Jesus, — a teacher of a 
strange and unpopular doctrine, — to throw 
Himself so much upon simple assertion. And 
here comes in that power of Christ's personal- 
ity already alluded to. It needed a wonderful 
self to carry those assertions ; it needed the 
peculiar quality of that self infused into those 
assertions so as to give them a self-evidencing 
power. It is not every one that can dogma- 
tize effectively. The power of a dogma lies 



12 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 



very much in who propounds it. When a 
youthful pulpit orator, fresh from the semi- 
nary, lays down the principles of family gov- 
ernment to a congregation of fathers and 
mothers, all that he says may be thoroughly 
true, but the fathers and mothers either smile, 
or are thinking of something else ; and the 
washerwoman in the corner under the gallery, 
with half a dozen rampant olive-plants at 
home, if she does not say as much, feels that 
she can tell the preacher a great deal more 
about his subject than he is telling her. The 
lesson, however truthful, is truth outside of 
the preacher, not a part of him ; not the ex- 
pression of experience or sympathy or any- 
thing residing in him. Therefore, the more 
dogmatic he is, the more absurd he is. It is 
simply stage-thunder. As the best-made can- 
non-ball is useless until fitted to its cannon, so 
the soundest and most compact dogma is impo- 
tent until it is cast in the mould of individual 
experience and propelled by personality. 

Therefore Christ could dogmatize effect- 
ively. No one but Christ could have given 
lodgment to such w T ords as — " Ye must be 
born again " He that believeth not is con- 
demned already ": " God is a Spirit, and they 
that worship Him must worship Him in spirit 
and in truth ": " He that loveth his life loseth 



CHRIS T AS A TEA CHER. j ^ 

it ": " On these two commandments hang 
all the law and the prophets." Back of all 
lay His deep, divine self-consciousness, the 
knowledge that He was Himself the Truth. 
When He taught, it was the Truth speaking 
the truth. No doubt lingered in any remote 
depth of His soul : no secret apprehension or 
haunting sense of possibility that any word of 
man could overthrow the word of the living 
God. Pure, absolute certainty was the foun- 
tain-head of His speech : intuitive certainty 
that what He uttered was the eternal verity 
and reality, beside which the imaginings and 
dialectic subtleties of worldly-wise men were 
but cobwebs. " He was certain that though 
He never wrote, only spoke, His words were 
imperishable, and would outlast heaven and 
earth. He was at the first as at the last cer- 
tain of the reality of His words and claims, 
of their endurance and triumph. He was as 
calmly and consciously confident when He 
sat, pitied by Pilate, in the shadow of Cal- 
vary, as when He went forth, approved by 
John, to preach, in His fresh and glorious 
manhood, the Gospel of the kingdom of God." 

Out of this we may draw at least one valu- 
able practical lesson for the Christian teacher. 
There are indeed questions raised by the 
Gospel toward which he must bear himself as 



j 4 CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 

a humble and reverent learner. He comes, 
not unfrequently, to a something tangled and 
complicated to his human sense, like the bush 
on Horeb, yet like that bush, burning with 
God's fire, before which he can only stand 
with unshod feet, waiting for the voice from 
the flame. But the Gospel has certainties as 
well as mysteries. It would not be a Gospel 
else. And toward its great, fundamental 
positions, his attitude is to be that of assur- 
ance. In modern teaching there is often mani- 
fest too strong a disposition to put Chris- 
tianity on the defensive. It was Coleridge, I 
believe, w 7 ho declared that he was " sick of 
evidences of Christianity/' We can not work 
for men's salvation with anything less than a 
certainty, held by us as it w T as held and pro- 
pounded by Christ, as a fixed, unalterable, 
eternal fact. Men can not be moved to self- 
abandonment and self-consecration by an open 
question. If the Gospel is something yet to 
be proved, it is time that Christians, at least, 
abandoned it for something else. I know that 
Christianity involves questions which are yet 
in court ; but none of these are vital. If, 
however, the Gospel itself is still a thing in 
doubt ; if there is a possibility that science 
may yet put us out in the cold, without a Sav- 
iour and bankrupt in faith, and shivering in 



CHRIST AS A TEA CHER. j ^ 

the blasts from every point of the philosophic 
compass, — I, for one, want no more of it. 
Let me go clown from the Christian teacher's 
place, if my business there is only to urge a 
probability, or to flaunt a flag from the top of 
pasteboard bastions which the next shot from 
a well-trained infidel battery will breach. The 
alternative for us is a sure Gospel or no gospel. 
Evidences of Christianity have their function, 
and an important function ; but it is, I am in- 
clined to think, in the majority of cases, rather 
the education of believers than the conviction 
of unbelievers. As Christian teachers our busi- 
ness is less to argue than to assert the Word of 
God, and the Gospel of Christ as the power 
of God unto salvation. A great modern 
preacher has well said, " If we would trust 
Christ's cross to stand firm without our stays, 
and, arguing less about it, would seldomer tiy 
to prop it and oftener to point to it, it 
would draw more men to it." 

Sunday-school teachers must, in the nature 
of the case, be mostly dogmatic. " The creed 
of childhood/' one has justly said, " must 
necessarily be imparted dogmatically." It 
must rest on authority ; and authority which 
carries home the truth to a child's mind is 
born of a living Christian personality in the 
teacher. The standard of preparation must 



1 5 CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 

not be let down ; the demands of Scriptural 
study must be strictly met ; but the carefully 
gathered knowledge, in order to move and 
impress the pupil, must be fused by the Holy 
Spirit into the mould of a living experience. 
In Bible-classes of older pupils, the teacher 
must, of course, be prepared to answer objec- 
tions and to deal w T ith doubts ; but he must 
never take the attitude of a doubter himself. 
If a question is asked which he can not an- 
swer, or a problem raised which he can not 
solve (and the veriest child w r ill often pro- 
pound such), let him say so frankly, but 
always in such a w T ay as to let it be under- 
stood that no possible solution or answer can 
in any wise disturb for him the solid ground- 
work and substance of the Gospel. He must 
never tread gingerly on Gospel ground. It is 
holy ground, but firm ground ; and though he 
may not be able to arrange and explain all 
that is upon it, he is to step as one who knows 
that the Rock of Ages is under it. 

CHRIST A SYSTEMATIC TEACHER. 

I go on to note that Christ was a systematic 
teacher. I do not mean in the scholastic 
sense of elaborating a system of morals or 
theology. He left that for others. But it is 
a great mistake to suppose, as not a few do, 



• # 

CHRIS T AS A TEA CHER. j j 

that Christ's teaching was a disorderly collec- 
tion of fragments which it should be the task 
of future students to sift out and arrange. 
Christ's teaching was methodical in its inner 
structure. This opens a very wide subject, 
and I can only touch a point here and there. 

Take, for example, the progression in His 
teaching. Compare the last chapters of John's 
gospel with the Synoptists. A great advance 
is perceptible. The teaching is less rudiment- 
ary. It appeals to a higher grade of spiritual 
development. Transfer it to the beginning of 
Christ's ministry, and you at once perceive 
that it does not fit there. " The Sermon on 
the Mount at the opening of the ministry, 
and the address in the upper chamber de- 
livered at its close, are separated from each 
other, not only by difference of circumstance 
and feeling, but as implying on the part of 
the hearers wholly different stages in the 
knowledge of truth." * Matthew throws a 



* Thomas Dehany Bernard, " The Progress of 
Doctrine in the New Testament." This most valu- 
able and suggestive book, of which a cheap Amer- 
ican Edition has been published, ought to be on the 
desk of every Bible-class teacher. On this topic 
the teacher may also profitably consult Canon West- 
cott's " Introduction to the Study of the Gospels/' 
another convenient and admirable manual. 



jg CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 

bridge from the old economy to the new. 
John carries forward the piers toward that 
final heavenly economy of which he gives us 
a glimpse in the Apocalypse. In Matthew 
we have Jesus as the Messiah ; in John as the 
Eternal Word. In Matthew He is the fulfil- 
ment of prophecy. In John He is Himself 
the prophet and the earnest of better, heav- 
enly things to come. " His record is a creative 
source, and not a summary ; the opening of a 
new field of thought, and not the gathered 
harvest. " Matthew keeps Christ before us as 
the interpreter and fulfiller of the law : in 
John He appears introducing the grander and 
richer economy of the Spirit. In the one He 
satisfies the law, in the other the want of hu- 
manity. John represents Him as the world's 
life; the disciple's friend and teacher; the ob- 
ject of faith, the magnet of love, the focal 
point of prayer, the goal of hope, the inspirer 
of service. Matthew's backward look stops 
at Abraham ; John leads us back into the 
eternal past, where dwelt the Word before 
Abraham was. In Matthew we have the new 
interpretation of old precept ; in John, the 
fact and the secret of fellowship. Matthew 
tells how to follow Him, John how to abide 
in Him. Matthew's gospel is the gospel of 
an infant church, John's of a matured church. 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER, jg 

Or take the parables. Sometimes it seems 
as if Christ were repeating Himself, or simply- 
piling up illustration round a single truth. On 
the contrary, it will always be found that the 
truth is many-sided, and that the illustra- 
tions grow from the different sides. Three 
parables, for instance, are grouped round the 
topic of Christ's saving the lost : the Lost 
Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Lost Son. 
The first two are an answer to the Pharisees, 
who complained that He ate with publicans 
and sinners, and who counted a common man 
of less value than a sheep. In the third, the 
explanation of His conduct is referred to its 
higher reason as the work of the Father. In 
the parable of the sheep, the interest centres 
in the loss : of the coin, in the search : of the 
son, in the restoration. In the first is pictured 
loss through stupid and blind straying : in the 
second, loss in the very sphere of the king- 
dom of God, through the power of worldly 
circumstance which withdraws the man from 
circulation, and obscures God's image in him, 
as the dust hides the superscription of the 
coin. In the third, loss through wilful aban- 
donment of filial privilege : so that we see loss 
under the three aspects of witlessness, useless- 
ness, and rebelliousness. Once more, the 
seeker of the lost appears under the power of 



20 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 



three motives : compassion for man's misery ; 
a sense of the humblest man's transcendent 
value ; and consummate fatherly love. 

Or look at the two parables which set forth 
the lesson of faithful service : — The Talents 
and the Pounds. These are not the same. 
Luke does not put Matthew into another 
form. The lessons are different. Look at 
Luke. Ten servants : a pound to each ser- 
vant : interest ten pounds for one : reward, 
ten cities, and " good servant." Interest five 
pounds for one ; reward five cities, and no 
" good servant/' In other words, endowment 
equal, interest unequal, standard of merit 
and of reward determined by amount or 
quantity ; ten cities for ten per cent. ; five 
cities for five per cent., w T ith an unpleasant 
hint in the omission of " good servant." 
Now turn to Matthew. Three servants : five 
talents to one, two to another, one to the 
third. Interest five talents on five; reward, 
u Good and faithful servant, enter into the joy 
of thy Lord." Interest two talents on two. 
Reward, " Good and faithful servant, enter 
into the joy of thy Lord." Thus we have, 
endowment unequal, interest unequal, but re- 
ward equal : standard of merit and of reward 
determined not by quantity, but by quality. 
The same reward is assigned to different quan- 



CHRIS T AS A TEA CHER. 



21 



titles because both bear the common stamp 
of faithfulness. In short, where servants 
equally endowed make an unequal use of 
their endowments, they are unequally re- 
warded. Where servants unequally endowed 
are equally faithful, the reward is equal.* 

Take the " Beatitudes " at the opening of 
the Sermon on the Mount. Do you think 
that those blessings are thrown out at random, 
and that it would make no difference whether 
our Lord should begin with " Blessed are the 
poor in spirit/ 5 or " Blessed are they that are 
persecuted for righteousness' sake "? Not so 
indeed. This series is constructed on a defi- 
nite plan, and proceeds with a close, inner, 
logical connection. Note first how the bless- 
ings fall into two groups, answering to the ar- 
rangement of both the Lord's Prayer and the 
Decalogue : the first four, like the first four 
commandments, and the first four items of 
the Lord's prayer, looking upward, from earth 
to heaven, from man to God, and indicating 
qualities in man as related to God : the other 
group looking earthward, and contemplating 



* I would earnestly recommend teachers to pro- 
cure and study Dr. A. B. Bruce's work on " The 
Parabolic Teaching of Christ." It is published by 
A. C. Armstrong & Son. 



22 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER, 



man's relations to his fellow-man, and to his 
earthly surroundings. 

Then, note further, a progress in the ar- 
rangement. The sermon starts from a point 
outside the kingdom of God, and shows us 
how a man comes into it. The blessings, 
therefore, follow the steps of progress toward 
citizenship. Our Lord brings the kingdom 
of Heaven at once into the field of vision. 
The man says, " What is the kingdom of 
Heaven to me? Why should I want it?" 
That is the very question. Are you conscious 
of any reason why you should want it ? Do 
you feel any need of it? If not, you will not 
gain it, for only those who feel such a need 
seek and find it. Hence, " Blessed are the 
poor in spirit " could properly stand nowhere 
else than at the beginning. Poverty of spirit 
means just what poverty means always and 
everywhere. It means to the spiritual and 
moral nature what being poor means to the 
pocket, to the appetite, to the naked and 
chilled body — conscious want : a sense of 
emptiness. Spiritually, it is the opposite of 
self-satisfaction ; and no man will seek the 
kingdom of God, of which the first principle 
is " Deny self," so long as he is satisfied with 
self. 

When one has squarely confronted his need, 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 2 $ 

and has confessed to himself, " I am poverty- 
stricken at the very sources of my being," the 
result will be mourning. There will be some- 
thing in him answering to the poor man's 
gnawing pain from hunger, and his chill from ^ 
cold. Therefore mourning drops naturally 
into the second place. A Roman poet tells 
us how one of the gates of the city of Rome 
was always dropping moisture from its arches. 
It is a type of the entrance to the kingdom of 
Heaven, which is through tears. The sorrow 
is the sorrow of conscious mistake, of disap- 
pointment, of wounded pride, of newly dis- 
covered weakness and sinfulness : sorrow 
over emptiness of wisdom, of satisfaction, of 
cause for self-gratulation, of strength and of 
goodness. 

The man who is really hungry and thirsty 
will take such food as you give him. The 
beggar is not the chooser. Sorrow accom- 
plishes nothing until it brings us down to the 
point where we are ready, not only to accept 
and endorse God's charge of weakness and 
error, but to take His remedy for these, what- 
ever it be : ready and willing to be fed with 
Goer's meat ; to take God's prescription for 
sin ; to take Christ's yoke of docility and sub- 
missive obedience. Here, therefore, Meek- 
ness, the spirit of absolute submission and 



24 CHRIST AS A TEA CHER. 

subjection, grounded in a true humility, falls 
into its appropriate place. 

From a sorrowful and often vague sense of 
need, and a meek willingness to confess its 
source and to have it supplied in God's own 
way and on God's own terms, we move on to 
the clearer definition of the need itself. The 
man finds out what he wants. All his sense 
of emptiness and his consequent mourning 
and submissiveness now run into the channel 
of one great desire — to be holy. He hungers 
and thirsts after righteousness. Christ says 
to him, "The thing you have all along wanted 
is Tightness ; right relation to me and to my 
law and to my children. Seek that first — my 
kingdom and my rightness." This desire is 
no sickly sentiment. Hunger and thirst mean 
vigorous appetite. Holiness is adapted to 
call out all the best energies. Our Lord and 
His apostles never contemplate any lower 
ideal than an enthusiasm in its pursuit. You 
see how naturally this beatitude falls into line 
with the others. Poverty of spirit engenders 
mourning ; mourning, meekness ; poverty, 
mourning, meekness, issue in holy desire, and 
desire in satisfaction. "They shall be filled." 

Now we turn earthward. A man filled with 
God's righteousness, which includes joy and 
peace, can not keep it to himself. Righteous- 



CHRIST AS A TEA CHER, 2 5 

ness is in him, not as dead precept, but as " a 
fountain of water springing up." Righteous- 
ness, like water in a reservoir, is pervaded 
with a thrust and pressure outward and down- 
ward toward men. It will get out of the man, 
and flow to his brethren in the form of mercy. 
The next blessing, as we might expect, is on 
the merciful. Mercy is Tightness toward God 
taking shape in loving Tightness toward men. 
It grows out of righteousness as a branch from 
a vine. You find the same essential connec- 
tion between righteousness and mercy in the 
Old Testament. Says the Psalmist, " Unto 
Thee, O Lord, belongeth mercy, for Thou 
renderest to every man according to his work." 
There is no clash between righteousness and 
mercy, as is so often assumed. It was the 
highest righteousness which gave the world 
the grandest token of mercy. It is the Just 
who is the Justifier. 

But here we are guarded. There is a some- 
thing called mercy which has no essential con- 
nection with righteousness; but is merely a 
natural, humane impulse, a kindly " good-na- 
ture," which often finds expression in kind 
and helpful deeds, but which often goes hand 
in hand with unbridled self - indulgence. 
Righteousness is the test of mercy on the one 
side; now Christ puts a test on the other 



26 



CHRIST AS A TEA CHER, 



side: — Purity of heart; righteousness at its 
fountain-head. Therefore we recognize the 
true place of the next beatitude, " Blessed 
are the pure in heart." 

Then, for I must hasten on, a pure heart is 
a peaceful heart, because at peace with God ; 
and such a heart seeks to be at peace with 
men, and studies the things which make for 
peace. Notice that the blessing is not to 
peaceable men, but to makers of peace ; pro- 
moters of it among their brethren. It is the 
part of a righteous man not only to " keep 
the peace " himself, but to come, bringing 
Christ's olive-branch into the midst of their 
dissensions and strifes. This, then, is the true 
place for the blessing on the Peacemakers. 

But to such an one, peace means, first of 
all, right. He knows no peace at the expense 
of right. Christ is the " Prince of peace/ 
but righteousness is the " girdle of his loins." 
Hence Christ's disciple inevitably comes into 
collision with an unrighteous world, and the 
result is persecution for righteousness' sake. 
The very lips which uttered this beatitude, 
said, " I came not to send peace, but a sword." 
This blessing rightly closes the list. It would 
be manifestly out of place at the beginning. 
It presupposes all that is contained in the 
preceding beatitudes. 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 2 J 

So of the Lord's prayer. Put " Our Father 
which art in Heaven," anywhere but at the 
beginning, and see if you can pray that prayer. 
Begin, for instance, with " Thy kingdom 
come." What a tremendous question, what 
an awful doubt you encounter at once. " Thy 
kingdom"! But zvhose kingdom? What is 
it, or who is it that we are inviting to lay us 
under absolute subjection and tribute? Is it 
a beneficent power, or a power of evil and 
tyranny? The doubt is forestalled by the 
words " Our Father, Thy kingdom come." 
But not to dwell on the matter of order and 
progress in the Lord's prayer, note the mirac- 
ulous way in w T hich the whole Sermon on the 
Mount is packed into it. Take up that ser- 
mon at any point, and you will strike a line 
leading directly to the Lord's prayer. A 
heavenly economy of life must include some 
provision for putting and keeping us con- 
sciously in contact with Heaven. It must be an 
economy which we can pray as well as live. 
And therefore the Sermon on the Mount, 
which is the manual of the kingdom of 
Heaven, the exposition of the divine economy 
of life, has a prayer bedded in its heart, and 
connected by living fibres with its entire struc- 
ture. The Lord's prayer is the Sermon on 
the Mount cast into aspiration. 



CHRIS T AS A TEA CHER. 



I have only to remark farther, that Christ 
shows His consummate art as a teacher by 
His skilful veiling and draping of His lines of 
system. The fault of many teachers is in un- 
duly emphasizing their plan. A Sunday-school 
lesson may be so ingeniously constructed as to 
draw all the attention to its structure, while 
its subject-matter goes begging ; and many a 
preacher has spoiled a sermon by keeping the 
lines and joints of his plan constantly on the 
surface. Nature gives us a lesson on this point. 
She is the greatest of systematizers, with the 
widest range and the richest variety in her sur- 
face developments. She builds a man over a 
skeleton, but she hides the skeleton; and it is 
the flash of the eye, the mobility and variety 
of expression, the inflections of the voice, the 
infinite diversity of movement and attitude, 
which appeal to us, and not the nice articula- 
tion of bones. With Christ, method was a 
means and not an end. He aimed at direct 
contact of the heart with the living substance 
of His speech ; and it was because nothing was 
suffered to stand between these, that men said, 
" Never man spake like this man." 

CHRIST A GREAT QUESTIONER. 

I have but a few minutes left for one other 
point. Christ was a great questioner. 



CHRIS T AS A TEA CHER. 2 9 

It is a common saying that any fool may 
ask a question which a wise man can not an- 
swer. That is true ; but it does not follow 
that any fool knows how to question. It re- 
quires quite as much wisdom to put questions 
as to answer them. Christ was early found in 
the temple asking questions ; not indeed as a 
teacher, for a lecturing Christ-child would have 
been a monstrosity befitting the Apocryphal 
gospels rather than the narratives of the Evan- 
gelists. But those old Rabbis knew what apt 
questioning was, and they were astonished at 
the wisdom of His questions as well as of His 
answers. Socrates was a master of the art ; 
and it is the skilful, subtle questioning which 
leads on and sustains our interest through a 
dialogue of Plato. Paul deals much in inter- 
rogation. In the Epistle to the Romans, you 
will find six questions in the second chapter, 
sixteen in the third, six in the sixth, nine in 
the ninth, ten in the eleventh ; and so in 
other epistles. Christ's teaching abounds in 
question, and in question aimed at a great va- 
riety of ends. If you assume the teacher at 
your first contact with the uninstructed, you 
are quite as likely to excite his resentment as 
his interest or respect ; for ignorance is gen- 
erally conceited, and it touches his conceit, 
not that you should know more than he does, 



2Q CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 

but that you should assume to know more. If 
you make him a sharer in your thought by a 
question which appeals to his thought, you 
catch him on the side of his sympathy. 

You will observe how often Christ intro- 
duces His lessons by a^ question, apparently 
very simple and commonplace, which draws 
the hearers mind into His own train of thought 
and enlists his attention and interest before 
he knows it. " What think ye ? If a man 
have an hundred sheep, and one go astray, 
doth he not leave the ninety and nine and go 
after the one ? " " What think ye of the 
Christ ? Whose son is he ? " Or sometimes 
He tells a story, as He only knew how to tell 
it, and then a question puts the clew of the 
lesson into the hearer's hand, and sets him at 
following it up. " Which now of these three 
thinkest thou was neighbor to him that fell 
among thieves? " " The Lord frankly forgave 
both the debtors : Simon, which of the two 
will love Him most?" The question at the 
beginning has a power of arrest ; at the end, 
a power of lodgment. Sometimes He combines 
the two, as in the story of the two sons sent 
into the vineyard : " What think ye ? " and, 
at the end, " Whether of the twain did the 
will of his father?" Sometimes He uses a 
question to silence or to commit an adversary : 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 

"The baptism of John, was it from heaven or 
of men ? " or in the parable of the wicked hus- 
bandmen : " What shall therefore the Lord 
of the vineyard do ? " Sometimes, again, to 
make a point on which to hang a lesson. 
" Those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam 
fell, — suppose ye they were sinners above all 
that dwelt in Jerusalem ? I tell you nay ; but 
except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish." 
Sometimes, to bring home a truth of God's 
love and tenderness by a familiar analogy. 
" If your son ask bread, will you give him a 
stone? " " If God clothe the grass, shall He 
not much more clothe you?" Or again, to 
bring an every-day truth over into the moral 
consciousness : " Do men gather grapes of 
thorns, or figs of thistles ? " " Which of you, 
proposing to build a tower, does not first count 
the cost? " Or, once more, to bring out some 
conceit or delusion, as when, at the close of 
the series of parables in the thirteenth of 
Matthew, He asks, " Have ye understood all 
these things? " One is tempted to smile at 
the ready complacency with which they an- 
swered, " Yea, Lord ! " 



II. 



At the con'clusion of my lecture last year, 
you kindly requested me to discuss some other 
aspects of the same subject at which I hinted, 
but which I had not time to treat then. Re- 
suming, therefore, the former theme, I shall 
speak first of 

CHRIST AS A GREAT ILLUSTRATOR. 

All great teachers have recognized the power 
of illustration. Plato revels in it. Dante's 
" Commedia " and Homer's " Iliad " and " Od- 
yssey " are picture-books. The part of a ser- 
mon which sticks, is the illustrative part. Often 
the hearer will carry away nothing else. Dr. 
Beman, of Troy, used to say that if he wanted 
to preach an old sermon and not have it recog- 
nized (a very useless precaution, by the way), 
he took out the bears ; meaning those striking 
illustrations which, being lodged in the hearers' 
memory, w T ould serve to identify the sermon. 
Unless he put in some other "animals" of 
the same kind, I must needs say, w r ith all rev- 
erence to his memory, that he was likely to 
purchase concealment at the expense of inter- 
est 



CHRIS T AS A TEA CHER. ^ 3 

est. You can not teach children effectively 
without illustration. You must appeal to the 
eye ; and that fact is recognized in the best 
modern educational systems. And in the pro- 
cess of learning, the average man is not greatly 
in advance of the child as respects this matter. 
Not logic, but seeing, is the shortest way to 
truth. Seeing is believing. Christ came, a 
light into the world, that men might know 
the truth. Most words are originally meta- 
phors or picture-forms into which the primi- 
tive man casts a statement. After a time the 
lines of the picture fade, and the word be- 
comes merely the symbol of a fact, yet it 
always carries the original picture deep down 
in its heart. It was something beside super- 
stition which filled the old churches with 
paintings and mosaics. Men can not always 
read books, but they can read pictures. When 
there were no books or few books, and reading 
was confined to priests, they did the people a 
Christian service who painted their Gospel for 
them. So, w T hen the worshipper could read 
the story of the creative week on the choir- 
walls of Monreale, or the stories of Abraham 
and Sarah and Meichizedek behind the altar 
of San Vitale at Ravenna, or could follow the 
whole history of redemption in St. Mark's at 
Venice, from the fall of man, and the lives of 



24 CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 

the patriarchs in the portico, to the ascension 
of Jesus in the overarching dome, — he was 
not without a Bible. We forget sometimes 
how much the painters helped to carry the 
truth of the Gospel over the gap of the dark 
ages. 

Illustrations serve the same purpose, for 
illustrations are pictures. The highest en- 
dorsement of illustrative teaching is furnished 
by Christ. Let us consider some of the char- 
acteristics of this method as employed by 
Him. 

It is essential to a good illustration that it 
should turn on a point common to the under- 
standing of teacher and pupil alike. If I were 
trying to teach an African savage a religious 
truth by means of an illustration drawn from 
the use of the telephone, I should only con- 
fuse him, and give him two difficulties for one. 
He does not know what a telephone is, to be- 
gin with. I could do it with an illustration 
taken from his bow or canoe or war-club, for 
both he and I know what those are and what 
they mean. 

You observe, therefore, that Christ's illus- 
trations always start from a point as familiar 
to His hearers as to Himself. If He had cited 
some marvel of the spiritual world out of 
which He came, some most ordinary feature 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER. ^ 

of His heavenly dwelling-place, they would 
only have stared at Him, and their interest in 
the truth He was expounding would have 
given place to curiosity excited by this new 
wonder. Instead of that, He takes a man 
building a house, or finding treasure in a field, 
or sowing seed, or catching fish, or a woman 
sweeping the floor or making bread. He sets 
the hearer on the familiar, commonplace truth, 
so that from it he can reach up to the higher 
and less familiar spiritual truth. 

Hence our Lord drew a great many of His 
illustrations from nature. All His hearers 
knew how seed was sown and the stages by 
which it grew. They were familiar with the 
stony and the thorny ground and the hard- 
beaten wayside. They were wont to watch 
the changes of the sky, and they knew the 
quick rising and the terrible sweep of the 
mountain torrent. They had considered the 
lilies, the sparrows, and the reed shaken with 
the wind. Even the familiar aspects of nature, 
however, never appeal to men so strongly as 
when they are somehow associated with man's 
person or work or danger or pleasure : and 
therefore, in Christ's illustrations from nature, 
He draws largely on its aspects after it has 
felt the hand of man. He takes His hearers 
to the vineyard, but the husbandman is there, 



^6 CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 

tending and pruning the vines. To the field, 
but the sower comes, scattering seed by the 
wayside and among the thorns. He bids 
them mark the sparrows, but they are the 
dead sparrows, strung on spits, and sold in 
the market. He tells of the flocks, but the 
prominent figure is the good shepherd ; of 
the mountain torrent, but as it sweeps away 
the foolish man's house from its sandy foun- 
dation. 

The significance of this feature of Christ's 
illustrative teaching is too large a subject to 
be discussed here, but the theme is, neverthe- 
less, too tempting to be dismissed without a 
few 7 words. This habitual association of na- 
ture with man furnishes more than a hint of 
the depth o'f Christ's insight into nature, and 
of the comprehensiveness and symmetry of 
His view of the universe ; for it reveals His 
recognition of the fact that nature finds its 
chief significance and its highest interpreta- 
tion in man. Nature, even on the physical 
side, does not give up its best to the bird or 
the beast. The jungle, however luxuriant, 
can never mean nor yield so much as the field 
of sown corn. But, in its association with 
man, nature yields more than food or build- 
ing material. It furnishes spiritual and moral 
lessons -which have no meaning and no appli- 



CHRIS T AS A TEA CHER. ^ 7 

cation apart from man, and which only man 
can receive and appropriate. The whole spir- 
itual meaning of nature lies latent until nature 
is touched by man. And this meaning our 
Lord is at pains that men should extract from 
it. He would have them know that this rela- 
tion between man and nature enables him to 
make even brute bulks and familiar physical 
forces vocal with truths of the soul. He is 
not satisfied that they should draw from na- 
ture only bread and drink and impressions of 
form and color; and accordingly he lifts na- 
ture into the seat of a spiritual teacher. The 
corn of wheat, casting its seed-form and tak- 
ing on the nobler vesture of the full corn in 
the ear, in some valley unvisited by man, 
means only a few grains for the bird or a 
mouthful for the browsing beast. When man 
comes, only then, Christ comes and makes 
that dying and risen wheat-corn a lesson and 
a type of death unto self, spiritual resurrec- 
tion, and moral fruitfulness. 

Paul, though surely not blind to this truth, 
does not work it into his teaching as Christ 
does. In his Epistles we breathe chiefly " the 
air of cities and synagogues.'' He draws very 
sparingly on Nature for illustration, and mani- 
festly lacks that quick and exquisite suscepti- 
bility to the various phases of nature which 



^8 CHRISTASA TEACHER. 

so strongly marks our Lord. Yet there is, 
even at this point, a deep-lying resemblance 
between them, in that both see " the universe 
of God as it is reflected in the heart and life 
of man." No one can help feeling this in 
reading Paul's words in the eighth of Romans, 
on the " groan and travail" of the creation — 
the sympathy of man's material and animal 
environment with the pangs and longings of 
fallen humanity.* 

From his habit of selecting familiar things 
for illustrations, we are quite prepared to find 
his range of illustration extending into the 
domestic and business spheres. Men are fa- 
miliar most of all with their homes. There- 
fore we are pointed to the grain-measure 
which was in every house, together with the 
lamp-stand and the bed. The woman loses 
her silver in the house, and lights her lamp 

* I can not but think that Canon Farrar (" Life and 
Work of St. Paul," I., 18-21) is rather too sweeping 
in his assertion that Paul "reveals not the smallest 
susceptibility for the works of nature." I fear I 
must have failed to apprehend his meaning, where 
he says that the illustration of the wild-olive graft 
(Rom. xi. 16-25) is " the only elaborate illustration 
which Paul draws from nature "; for it seems incon- 
ceivable that the Canon should have overlooked the 
fifteenth of First Corinthians. Indeed he cites the 
allusion to the stars in v. 41. 



CHRIS T AS A TEA CHER. ^ g 

and sweeps. The home-life is the background 
of the story of the prodigal. There is the 
wedding feast, and the servant sitting up for 
his master ; the boy asking his father for a 
cake of bread ; the washing of the dishes, and 
the rich man building new barns. The con- 
ceited guest enters and takes the first place at 
the banquet ; the woman sets her bread to 
rise, or grinds at the handmill; the scoundrel 
sows darnel by night among the wheat, and 
the belated traveller knocks at midnight at 
his neighbor's door, and asks for a loaf of 
bread. The pictures are from the market and 
the street also ; sometimes Hashing out from a 
single word. " Good measure shall men give 
into your bosom"; a dark saying to the man 
who goes to Washington market with his 
basket on his arm, but not so to the oriental, 
into the loose bosom of whose robe the trader 
would pour the day's supply of grain. The 
servants are away with their pounds to the 
money-changers ; the steward bustles about 
among his lord's creditors and discounts their 
bills for cash ; the creditor chokes his debtor 
on the highway, and the widow pleads her 
cause before the judge in the gate. 

Jn our Lord's teaching, moreover, the illus- 
tration is invariably subordinate to the truth 
illustrated, and grows naturally out of it. 



40 CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 

Unlike some modern teachers, He does not 
first light on His illustration and then trim 
and mould the truth to fit it. There are no 
stained windows in the structure of Christ's 
discourse, to stay the eye on themselves. 
The illustrations are for letting in light upon 
the truth. You can easily see that the great 
theme of the relations of men's souls to truth 
and their attitude toward God's Word, sug- 
gests the illustration of the seed on different 
soils, and that the process is not the contrary 
one. You can easily see that the grand con- 
ception of the pervasion of society with the 
spirit and law of God, came, in Christ's mind, 
before the picture of the woman hiding 
the leaven. The greater suggested the less. 
The illustration does not dominate the truth 
nor distract the attention from the truth 
to itself. Some teachers pour forth such a 
bewildering variety of brilliant illustration 
that the pupil loses sight of the truth al- 
together. Not a few modern sermons have 
had their genesis in a telling anecdote or a 
striking figure, and the whole sermon has been 
one ingenious inquisitorial process of stretch- 
ing a truth upon the rack of that pet illus- 
tration. 

I But with all the simplicity of Christ's illus- 
trations, they have an enormous range. On 



CHRIS T AS A TEA CHER. ^ j 

the surface they sometimes appear to explain 
merely the fragment of truth thrown out by 
the great teacher at the moment ; but the 
fragment, on examination, reveals connections 
with a large area of truth, and the illustration 
is found to cover the entire area no less than 
the fragment. Take, for instance, the familiar 
parable of the talents, and the Lord's com- 
ment. " To him that hath shall be given, 
from him that hath not shall be taken away." 
That truth ranges over the whole physical, 
intellectual, and spiritual life of men. The 
old woman who sells peanuts on the corner 
knows perfectly that she must have something 
to buy her peanuts with, before she can realize 
a profit on them. She and the capitalist are 
alike in that. Nothing is given to either of 
them without their first having. The man 
who has, makes. The educated and trained 
man masters a subject or does a piece of in- 
tellectual work better and more quickly than 
the untrained man of equal native ability. 
He wins the new knowledge through the dis- 
ciplined power which he has. An artist draws 
more inspiration and more ideas in a day from 
a beautiful landscape than the ignorant cow- 
feeder who has passed his whole life amid its 
beauties. Nature gives to the mind which 
has. The man who has power of any kind is 



^2 CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 

in a position to gain more power. In short, 
the truth holds all the way up, that capital 
brings interest. It holds in religion as else- 
where. The same words — " To him that hath 
shall be given " — are added to the parable 
of the sower. The stress is laid, in that par- 
able, not on the seed, which is assumed to be 
good, but on the soil. Where the soil had 
the right quality with which to meet the seed, 
there was fruit ; though there was a difference 
in the fruitfulness of even the good soil, rep- 
resented by thirty, sixty, and a hundred. The 
interest of Gospel truth and power presup- 
poses the possession of an honest and good 

J heart in the recipient. 

You can follow out the same line of thought 

^ivith the parables of the Mustard-seed and the 
Leaven. Or take Christ's illustration of the 
corn of wheat. How far-reaching is the truth 
it carries ; that a higher form of life is always 
won at the expense of a lower; that the high- 
^^t life comes through death ; that all success 

|p€osts. The business-man succeeds at .the price 
' of literary leisure and culture ; the boy grows 

. -into a man of learning and thought through 
the partial suppression of his animal instinct 
to play ; a man and woman attain in marriage 
^ y^that joint life of love, of higher quality than 
' the separate individuality of either, through 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER. ^ 

the partial merging of each individuality. 
Christ's sharp alternative is, the world or the 
soul. The soul is won at the price of the 
world. The sensual life must go under if the 
higher life of faith and love is to come to 
fruitage. So you see that the illustration, 
beginning in agriculture, covers business and 
learning and domestic life and religion. 

CHRIST A GREAT NARRATOR. 

But leaving this vein of thought, let us ex- 
plore another lying close beside it. Christ 
was a great narrator. It is a great art to be 
able to tell a story well, for it is an art which 
appeals to all mankind. In all times and 
countries men have welcomed the story-teller. 
We are all children in this. It does not show 
that a man is becoming wiser because he is 
losing his taste for stories. The child and the 
old man meet here on common ground. It 
is one of the harmless foibles of old age that 
it repeats its old stories. Charles Lamb some- 
where tells of a man who had retired, in a 
green old age, upon forty pounds a year and 
one anecdote. The great successes in litera- 
ture have been largely stories. " Robinson 
Crusoe/' "The Pilgrim's Progress," and "The 
Arabian Nights," are treasures forever. Ho- 
mer's " Odyssey" will always have more read- 



44 CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 

ers than the " Iliad. " Froissart will be well 
thumbed, while Hume and Lingard gather 
dust on the shelves. Macaulay will never lack 
readers, because he has imparted to English 
History the fascination of a story; and Her- 
odotus will continue to hold his own among 
the more modern magnates of history. In 
any circulating library they w T ill tell you that 
the demand for novels exceeds threefold that 
for any other class of books. Ten thousand 
of " Helen's Babies," and " Barriers Burned 
Away," are sold for one thousand of the best 
essays or sermons in the language. Very few 
people now living have read, I imagine, Gold- 
smith's " Animated Nature," but who has not 
read " The Vicar of Wakefield "? The Bible 
has made its way to the people largely by 
its stories. The boy of fifteen knows noth- 
ing about the Epistle to the Romans, but he 
can tell you all about Joseph and Moses and 
Samson. 

Story-telling, I repeat, is an art, and a fine- 
art. It seems as though it might be an easy 
thing to write a story like u Robinson Crusoe," 
but try it once. And there are certain features 
which, you notice, are common to all good 
story-tellers. Their first object, for instance, 
is to tell the story. A good many writers at- 
tempt stories as a kind of staging for their 



CHRIST AS A TEA CHER. ^ j 

moral reflections ; and, if the story has any in- 
terest at all, you usually find that the staging 
occupies the reader so that he overlooks the 
building. In other words, he skips the moral 
reflections and hurries on along the line of the 
story. Again, all good stories run. Chaucer's 
" Canterbury Tales," "Robinson Crusoe," "The 
Arabian Nights," are full of movement ; and 
the writers of popular fiction are coming to 
recognize that fact, and to shape their produc- 
tions accordingly. The popular romance of 
the day is not the old three-volume novel, but 
the short story with a simple plot and a suc- 
cession of incidents gathering up rapidly to a 
climax. 

Our Lord was a great master of narrative, 
and His stories exhibit not only the two qual- 
ties of which we have been speaking, but oth- 
ers which we shall note later. The best way 
to illustrate this is to examine one of His sto- 
ries in detail ; and we can not hesitate in the 
choice of a specimen, for the story of the Prod- 
igal Son is the model story of all literature, 
both as to contents and method. 

Observe, then, that Christ goes straight at 
the story. He does not work up to it through 
any elaborate introduction or learned prelude. 
We have no long family history of this good 
old father. "A certain man " — no matter who 



CHRIST AS A TEA CHER. 

or whence, any man will answer — "had two 
sons." There is no display of the narrator's 
power of analyzing character fastened upon 
a description of these two sons. All that 
the reader needs to know about them is left 
to come out in the development of the story 
itself. 

Then follows the fact out of which the plot 
of the story grows. Here, too, the reader is 
left to infer for himself the motives and feel- 
ings of the younger son — what he had been 
secretly brooding over ; what hopes and am- 
bitions he had been fostering; the whole pro- 
cess by which he had worked up to his decisive, 
unnlial act — all, in short, which would have 
furnished a chapter to the modern philosoph- 
ical romancer. The young man is introduced 
in the very act of striking the blow which cuts 
him loose from father and from home. A 
thoughtful reader will gather a great deal from 
those few words, as Christ meant that he 
should. The ingratitude, the insolence of the 
demand for his portion of goods, the insensi- 
bility to the privilege and love and protection 
of home — all are there, but wrapped up in 
the simple statement of his wicked act. Here 
the modern dramatic story-teller would have 
discovered another great opportunity. I have 
somewhere seen this part of the narrative 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 

worked up ; how the old man, Avhen the boy 
came into his presence, was seated at a table 
counting out, with trembling hands, a great 
pile of gold and silver, and more to the same 
effect. Now there is no pause. " Not long 
after." Every sentence tells. The youth 
wanted to manage his own affairs absolutely. 
He would leave nothing in his father's hands. 
" He gathered all together, and straightway 
took his journey/' and went as far away as 
he could, " into a far country," out of reach 
of fatherly hearing and counsel. And now 
the modern prurient story-teller would find 
his chance for a salacious description of a 
luxurious and licentious life. That is one of 
the favorite devices of the devils of modern 
literature. It is needless to remark how pure 
Christ's stories are. He uses the plainest words 
where there is occasion, but He never pictures 
sin so as to make it otherwise than ugly. 

Short and sharp again, but how vivid. 
" Scattered " is the word used of winnowing the 
grain. "He scattered his substance, living un- 
savingly." The great truth that absence from 
God is waste of life was never more tersely put : 
a far country and waste. We move on at once to 
the consequence. When the famine came, he 
had nothing. " He had spent alL" Moral waste 
is total waste. " He began to be in want." 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 

The painful and sometimes amusing adven- 
tures of reduced men in search of employment 
have furnished many a good story; but how 
powerfully that whole stage of the prodigal's 
career is put by the use of a single peculiar 
word, "he joined himself to a citizen. " The 
word means to " glue " or " stick to and its 
use here seems to imply that the sw T ine-owner 
was not over-eager to employ him. In time 
of famine people dispense with as many ser- 
vants as possible ; and it w r ould seem as 
though the penniless young wanton had to 
force himself upon the citizen. And so this 
swine-capitalist, having nothing else for him 
to do, or possibly with a vulgar satisfaction at 
having a decayed gentleman at his mercy, 
sent him into the fields to feed swine. Here 
the realistic story-teller would disport himself 
with the unsavory details of swine-keeping, 
and would draw out the contrast with the 
luxurious halls of pleasure. Nothing of this. 
The one thought to be driven home at this 
point is want. You see what a quick succes- 
sion and sharp putting of points there is : 
conceit and insubordination : waste : want. 
One or two sentences have furnished the 
world a synonym for soul - hunger. " He 
would fain have filled his belly with the husks 
which the swine did eat, and no man gave 



CHRIS T AS A TEA CHER. 

unto him." He had wanted the wrong thing 
all along, and it was no better now. All he 
wanted was to fill his belly. Suffering had 
not yet issued in longing for better things. 

Now another point : " He came to himself." 
Let your plummet down into that sentence, 
and you will find it very deep. It opens into 
the great truth that rebellion against God is a 
kind of madness. Man is his true self only 
when he is a loyal son in God's household : a 
madman else — in a delirious dream. What a 
stroke of art in representing the beginning of 
repentance as the return of a sound conscious- 
ness. And a chapter of imaginary, doleful 
reflections and contrasts could not exhibit the 
prodigal's awakened thought so graphically as 
this one sharp contrast in which he voices it. 
" My father's house — the very servants there 
have bread enough and to spare, and I, his 
own son, am perishing with hunger! " 

Now reflection merges into resolution. " I 
will arise ! I will go home ! I will confess 
my sin ! " No description now of the scenery 
along the road, nor of the various adventures 
encountered on the journey ; tricks of the 
story-teller to sharpen the reader's appetite 
for the climax by keeping him in suspense. 
The narrator is full of the thought of home, 
just as the reader is. At this point of the 



£q CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 

story you feel just as you do when you are 
returning to your native town and family 
homestead after years of absence. You do 
not care a penny for all the scenery in the 
world. The most exciting incident on the 
way is insipid. You only chafe at the delay 
it creates. You want to hurry those horses ; 
to pull out the throttle-valve of that engine, 
and drive through to home. Neither does 
the narrator stop while he affectingly pictures 
the old father looking out of the window or 
scanning the road, and tell of the tears with 
which he has moistened his pillow in the lone- 
ly nights when the rain was on the roof. The 
story needs no such details to make it pa- 
thetic. Its pathos lies deeper. Home, home 
is the theme. It is all in a sentence. " He 
arose and went to his father/' Pathos! In 
following such a story as this, one can weep as 
he runs. I wonder if any one can go on from 
this point without the floods pressing to his 
eyes. Oh, how the blessed details crowd upon 
each other. Swiftly as the story moved at the 
beginning, its pace quickens as it gathers 
up for the close. The father sees, — sees 
him a great way off. All the past look- 
ing and yearning are in that. Love and 
longing have made him far-sighted. " He 
ran." Love never lets its object come the 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER, 

whole way. Divine love urges the sinner to 
come, but it goes to meet him. Every feel- 
ing is now swallowed up in compassion. The 
embrace is first from the father's side. He 
falls on his son's neck. The confession is 
breathed, but without the request to be made 
a hired servant. The boy never could have 
said that with those arms round his neck. 

And now we reach the climax. Festivity. 
The joyful bustle of the awakened house has 
gotten into the story. How the orders pour 
from the happy father. " My son is at home 
with a son's heart in him. Bring out the best 
robe for him. My son is no dishonored beg- 
gar, but an honored guest. Put a ring on his 
finger. It is not fitting that my son should 
be hungry. Bring forth the fatted calf and 
kill it. The shadow is lifted from this home. 
Let us eat and drink and be merry, — servants 
and all." And then comes the whole Gospel 
in a brief paragraph. Man is a son of God : 
he is lost and dies by absence from God : he 
is found and lives again by penitent return to 
God. " This my son was dead and is alive 
again, he was lost and is found." 

I may take occasion here to remark that 
while enlargement upon the hints furnished 
by Scripture narratives is legitimate and often 
profitable, it is not that easy matter which it 



£2 CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 

often seems to a lively and teeming fancy ; 
and to do it effectively is something which re- 
quires nice judgment and a very clear insight 
into the whole drift and spirit of the story. A 
danger lies close beside it, of covering up the 
best points of the narrative with excessive or 
incongruous description, and of making it 
ridiculous by importing into it things quite 
alien to its meaning and original setting. I 
once heard a preacher describing the conver- 
sion of Saul of Tarsus. He brought him to 
Damascus, and then proceeded on this wise : 
" When Saul arrived at Damascus, he went at 
once to his hotel in Straight Street, and went 
directly to his room. To most people, the 
most pleasing sound in the world is the sound 
of the dinner-bell ; but when the dinner-bell 
rang, Saul didn't go down ! " And I found 
the following morsel in a volume of sermons 
for children, where the preacher was telling 
the story of Zacharias, the father of John the 
Baptist. He described Zacharias' recovery of 
speech as follows. I quote literally: "And 
while they were all wondering what this 
meant, old Zacharias gave a rattling kind of 
gurgle in his throat, or coughed away something 
that had been like a heavy cold on him, and he 
who had not spoken a word for nine months, 
now spoke out loudly like the rest of the peo- 



CHRIS T AS A TEA CHER. g ^ 

pie and praised God." I think I shall not be 
deemed uncharitable in expressing the wish 
that Zacharias' enforced silence might be im- 
posed, for a season at least, upon those who 
thus caricature the simple and dignified narra- 
tives of the Gospel, and feed the lambs of the 
flock with such miserable, I had almost said 
blasphemous trash. 

Let me briefly note some other peculiari- 
ties of our Lord's narrative style, at some of 
which I have already hinted in the story of 
the Prodigal. 

There is the dramatic element. Every 
good story contains more or less of this. There 
is a difference between annals and stories. 
Merely to string a number of incidents to- 
gether is not to tell a story. Much of the 
effect of a story depends on the grouping of 
the incidents ; the setting of the telling points 
in strong light and duly subordinating minor 
details. The art of story-telling consists in re- 
producing its scenes to the eye through the 
ear. The oriental story-teller and the racon- 
teur of Southern Europe are actors. If you 
want a good modern illustration of how a 
story can be dramatized in narrative, you will 
find one in Charles Readers charming little 
tale of " Christie Johnstone," where Christie 
tells to a holiday party of fishermen and fish- 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER. 

wives the story of the " Merchant of Venice/* 
as dramatized by Shakespeare. It is this 
characteristic of the Gospel stories which makes 
them such capital subjects for pictures ; a fact 
which the old artists who painted Scripture 
scenes far more than their modern successors, 
were not slow to appreciate. I should like to 
say some things, if time permitted, about the 
Bible stories in art ; and to show you how 
they adapt themselves to the various local pe- 
culiarities in which artists of different coun- 
tries and times set them, without sacrificing 
the point of their lessons. I will give you 
just one instance. In the gallery of the 
Louvre at Paris, there is a picture of the Prod- 
igal Son by the younger Teniers, in which all 
the details are distinctively Dutch. The 
young man, in the costume of a Dutch gal- 
lant, sits with two female companions at a ta- 
ble in front of an inn, on the shutter of which 
a tavern-score is chalked, and holds out his 
glass to be filled by an attendant. Over in 
the right-hand corner appears a pigsty, where 
a stable-boy is feeding the swine, but with his 
head turned toward the table as if in envy of 
the gay revellers there. The picture, with all 
its unbibiical setting, yet tells the Bible story 
effectively. Sensuality is the same under any 
garb. The difference between the youth at 



CHRIST AS A TEA CHER. g g 

the table and the youth at the sty is only su- 
perficial. Degradation is only the lower and 
grosser side of sin, a truth in Holland as in 
Palestine. The possible swineherd is already 
in the gay prodigal. 

You note the same dramatic element in the 
parable of the ten virgins. How vivid the 
long waiting ; the heads bowed in slumber ; 
the thrill of the midnight cry, " Behold the 
bridegroom !" the hurried filling and trimming 
of the lamps ; the woful plaint, " Our lamps 
are going out ! " the rush to the oil-vender; 
the closed door, and the stern finality of the 
terrible words from within, " I know you 
not ! " Perhaps one of the most fearfully dra- 
matic narratives of the New Testament is not 
always recognized as such, because of its brev- 
ity. I mean that of the rich man who would 
pull down his barns and build greater. With 
the most consummate art we are carried along 
in the current of the rich man's thought, for- 
getting with him everything but the heaps of 
treasure, the plans for the new barns, and the 
dreams of future luxury ; when, like thunder 
from a clear sky, breaks " Thou fool ! This 
night thy soul shall be required of thee ! " 
And as at the sudden shifting of a scene, a 
whole unsuspected economy of life is disclosed, 
and with the rich fool, unconscious till this in- 



5 g CHRIST AS A TEA CHER. 

stant of anything but money and barns, we 
look into a realm where on]y the soul counts, 
and riches count for nothing. 

Included in this dramatic element is the fre- 
quent use of dialogue. The characters speak 
for themselves. This is characteristic of the 
second part of the parable of the prodigal, 
where the respectable son is introduced. No 
disquisition on the unfilial, servile spirit which 
sometimes accompanies " good and regular 
standing/' could be half so telling as the 
glimpse we get of it at the house door, where 
it comes out that the older son's highest con- 
ception of filial service is something to be 
paid for with a feast. You will readily recall 
similar instances, such as the story of the 
wedding-feast, with the excuses of the several 
people invited, and the closing incident of the 
guest without the wedding-garment; also the 
Talents, the Unrighteous Steward, and the 
Laborers in the Vineyard. In these the char- 
acters interchange the appropriate language 
of the field, the market, or the guest-chamber. 

Just a word on the element of verisimilitude 
already touched upon in discussing Christ's 
illustrations. It might not be safe to assert too 
positively that all these stories told by our 
Lord are imagined. More than one of them 
may be a narrative of something which had 



CHRIST AS A TEACHER, ^ 

actually fallen under the Master's observation. 
But, however that may be, every incident, 
every word, every detail of these stories might 
have been true. Many of them, most indeed, 
have a local coloring which always arrests 
attention. It added to the effect of the par- 
able of the Good Samaritan, for instance, 
that the scene was laid on the Jericho road, 
which, as everybody knew, was infested with 
thieves ; while the passing of the priest and 
Levite would be emphasized by the equally 
familiar fact that Jericho was an important 
station of priests. Christ never employed an 
impossible or an improbable incident, and 
never took it out of its appropriate setting. 
And, therefore, in our teaching, it is always 
the safer course to reproduce these incidents 
as nearly as possible with their original cir- 
cumstances ; to see, and to try and make the 
learner see with Eastern eyes. It is hazard- 
ous to modernize a Bible story. The lesson 
may indeed assert itself through its incongru- 
ous setting, as we have seen in the case of the 
old painters ; but something is likely to get 
into it which mars its beauty and blurs its 
perfect impression. After reading John's ac- 
count of the marriage at Cana, one does not 
feel that our Lord is at home in Veronese's 
magnificent canvas, among the gorgeous robes 



Ejg CHRIST AS A TEACHER, 

of Venetian courtiers and the costly para- 
phernalia of an Italian banquet. 

Wondrous teacher! How lucid His teach- 
ing, as with the brightness which cometh out 
of the North, yet what depths in the heart of 
the light ! How terribly plain, yet how kindly. 
How positive and dogmatic, yet how sweetly 
reasonable. How profound and yet how sim- 
ple. How vivid and graphic, yet how dig- 
nified. How outspoken, yet how pure. How 
quick and subtle His perception of error or 
sophistry, yet how frank and generous His 
recognition of the smallest grain of truth. 
How patient He is with ignorance; how gen- 
tle with slowness of faith. How informal and 
familiar His lessons, yet with what logical com- 
pactness and system underneath them. How 
strongly drawn the lines of truth, yet what a 
freshness and freedom pervades it. What 
a divinity breathes through all His words. 
Surely, as we study, we shall find admiration 
merging into worship, and our lips and hearts 
giving back His own words — "Yea, Master, 
Thou art indeed both Teacher and Lord ; the 
wisest, the best, the dearest of Teachers, be- 
cause Lord over all, and blessed forever." 



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